Jamie Thraves is a British music video and film director. He began making experimental films at Hull University. Previously, he studied illustration which encouraged him to go down the creative lines working in the media industry. He made two videos; 'Scratch' and 'The Take-Out', which later won him many awards at short film festivals across the world after he had graduated from university. He then joined the Royal College of Art in 1993 where he made another award winning film 'the Hackney Downs'. After his time in the RCA, he went into a music video company called 'Oil Factory.' He made a major music video for Radiohead for their song, 'Just' which had a huge impact on audiences and Thraves got a lot of attention because of its strong narrative structure and the script. The subtitles are also strange for a music video and they have an unusually clever twist when in the end no one knows what the man says, which creates great intrigue.
There was much discussion for nearly 15 years by fans of Radiohead about what he might have said.
Thraves also made the music video for 'The Scientist' by Coldplay, which funnily enough also involves Chris Martin lying down on a bed mattress. The ideas behind the two music videos have clear connections, which show that Jamie Thraves thinks out of the ordinary on how he can portray a story so that it captures the viewer. For example, the music video for Coldplay is filmed and shown in reverse to tie in with the lyrics, 'I'm going back to the start,' which is quite literal and surreal. The music video for 'Just' shows a similar surreality.
Christ Martin in 'The Scientist' music video had to learn to sing the lyrics backwards so that he would appear to be singing the song when the the film was reversed. This took him a month to learn. The music video was filmed at a variety of locations, including London and Bourne Woods in Surrey.
What I find astonishing about Thraves' work is how he relates the video to the lyrics. What I like is his use of film in preference to special effects and computer graphics. In The Scientist, he takes simple shots but puts them in reverse and makes use of what could be really uninteresting, and turns them into something new and eye catching. I know they don't seem so new now, but of the time they were made, it wasn't really a path explored before in terms of what he used in both Coldplay and Radiohead's music tracks.
I also like how Thraves' music videos aren't too 'in your face' so you can actually listen to the music and relate it to the video rather than only remembering the video because it had too much of an impact.
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